Integrating Social Media Into Your Marketing Campaign

Organizations and companies are consistently challenged with the dilemma of how to incorporate social media into campaigns. While it may be difficult to work past the nuances of platforms and content, integrating social components into promotions is an integral part of modern-day communications plans.

Successful social media comes down to two driving factors: content and engagement. Good content will drive engagement, and strong engagement will lead to better content. Leveraging these two social media facets are at the core of any campaign.

So how do you do this? Here are some easy-to-implement ideas:

Examine your campaign: Take a step back and look at the campaign as it develops. What are the most interesting elements of the promotion? These are often the same components that are easily translated into social media content. Everything can be content; sometimes it just needs a little reformatting.

Reuse content: Chances are, your campaign already has developed or is developing artwork, photos or copy that will be used in multiple mediums. Edit an ad designed for print into a well-crafted Facebook timeline cover. Add a photo from the campaign to your Instagram feed with a caption to drive engagement. Condense copy from key messaging points into a tweet. Reutilizing elements not only maintains campaign integrity, but also reduces time and cost.

Build engagement: Engagement is the driving goal for utilizing social media in a campaign. Without interaction, your content may never been seen by a full audience. Develop a culture of availability to respond appropriately to comments and responses. The best way to do this is simply by answering questions and providing solutions to consumers’ problems. An interactive brand will thrive in environments where static brands do not.

Review: Evaluate the performance of not only the campaign, but also individual tactics within your social media strategy. Numbers of likes, retweets, reblogs and overall reach do not always define the success of social media within a campaign. Research the qualitative as much as the quantitative. Sometimes a customer driven back to a store or customer service gone well is as much a success as increasing the numbers.

While it is sometimes challenging to incorporate social media into a campaign, especially cross-departmentally, planning for social media integration is key in the development of any campaign.

Have you successfully integrated social media into a campaign? Tell us your success story in the comments below, or tweet your responses using the hashtag #mcgblog.